From a single line of old, clumsy code ...

Geeta Dayal in «Slate Book Review» reviews a book that will make you dizzy. In "BASIC: A single line of code sends readers into a labyrinth" she explores the mysteries of a brief line of computer code that draws a strange, beautiful and endless maze pattern on the screen, and much more besides. Here's a precis of what she writes:

Poet and Jacket contributor

Linda Russo currently teaches at the Washington State University. She received her Ph.D. in English from the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and her M.F.A. from Emerson College. She has taught creative writing, literature, women's writing, and expository writing. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Millay Colony for the Arts, and has given poetry readings in Toronto, Portugal and Cuba. Before coming to WSU, Russo directed Sounds Out, a reading series at the University of Oklahoma. Linda's current publication is «Mirth» from Chax Press, 30/01/2007 - 100 pages: In MIRTH, New York native Linda Russo "...speaks for and to this 'girl cold' spacetime, in blazes and remedies, with mirth-scholarly and civic, this work divines"--Elizabeth Treadwell. "*Mirth* (read: not 'comedy' nor 'tragedy') is an exhausted Empire's post-urbanity exposed. How much can we afford to guard (or not guard), and how much should we gamble ourselves out to anyone's game on the street. Linda Russo doesn't so much 'experiment' as throw down a viable metrics for every act"--Rodrigo Toscano.

For many years she has written for Jacket magazine, mainly on issues relating to women and contemporary US poetry. Here are the items she has written, gathered, or compiled for Jacket, with links to each item.

'Ísland', by Eliot Weinberger

Snaefellsnes Peninsula. Iceland has created the most perfect society on earth, one from which the rest of the world has nothing to learn. For its unlikely Utopia is the happy accident of a history and a geography that cannot be duplicated, or even emulated, elsewhere. Outside of the South Pacific, no ethnic group so small has their own entirely independent nation-state. There are only 268,000 Icelanders, of whom 150,000 live in and around Reykjavík, the capital. The second-largest city, Akureyri, known for its arts scene and night life -- their Barcelona -- has 14,000. In the rest of the country there are few people, and the treeless wilderness of volcanoes, waterfalls, strange rock formations, steaming lava fields, geysers, glaciers, and icebergs seems like the ends of the earth, as though one were crossing into Tibet and found the sea. Nearly all the roads are sparsely travelled and unpaved, yet this is a modern Scandinavian country where everything works, and where the state protects its citizens from birth to death. There is universal education and no unemployment, no poverty and no conspicuous wealth. Per capita book consumption and production is by far the highest in the world. They live longer than almost anyone else. There is no pollution: the entire country is geothermally heated...

'Fun City' it ain't, survey claims

More about Singapore in South-east Asia, where I recently enjoyed the 2012 Singapore Writers Festival:

Thanks to Singapore’s strength in finance, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and other industries, its economy almost doubled in 10 years, making the country of 5.3 million people one of the world’s wealthiest, with per-capita gross domestic product of $33,530.

Fun City it ain’t. U.S. pollster Gallup conducts surveys in more than 140 countries to compare how people feel about their lives. Singapore ranks as the most emotionless society in the world, beating out Georgia, Lithuania, and Russia. Singaporeans are unlikely to report feelings of anger, physical pain, or other negative emotions. They’re not laughing a lot, either. “If you measure Singapore by the traditional indicators, they look like one of the best-run countries in the world,” says Jon Clifton, a Gallup partner in Washington. “But if you look at everything that makes life worth living, they’re not doing so well.” [from Bloomberg Businessweek]

John Tranter founded this magazine in 1997. He has published more than twenty collections of verse, and has edited a number of poetry anthologies. His book «Urban Myths:210 Poems: New and Selected» (2006) won a number of major Australian prizes, and his latest book, «Starlight: 150 Poems», won the Melbourne «Age» Book of the Year poetry award and the Queensland Premier's Award for Poetry, both in 2011. As well as writing and editing poetry he has been a teacher, a publisher's editor, and a radio producer.

Photo: John Tranter, photo Anders Hallengren, Sydney, 2009

In October 1997 he founded the free Internet magazine «Jacket», and in 2010, after forty published issues, he granted «Jacket» to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where it grows and flourishes as «Jacket2». In his spare time he founded the Australian Poetry Library at http://poetrylibrary.edu.au/ which publishes over 40,000 Australian poems online. He is a Doctor of Creative Arts and is an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney School of Letters, Arts and Media, and an honorary member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is married with two children and currently lives in Sydney. Please feel free to browse by his Journal at johntranter.net and his vast homepage at johntranter.com.

From John Tranter: Hi. I have been asked to write a Commentary for «Jacket2» for a few months, starting in October 2012. Generally I sit in a rocker on the back porch, sipping from a jug of hooch and making wisecracks through the screen door; I guess the editors want to make me more useful. Well, hang around. I plan to look at some history -- how did I get here? -- and look at some of my favorite items in the forty issues of «Jacket» which I edited, including British, Canadian, European, Spanish-American and Australian poetry and creative and critical writing, and the ferment of the USA, and from time to time I will talk about other things that interest me including photography, printing, typography and the management of the philosophical tendencies of the common capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris).

Photo: Two capybaras anxiously discussing Wittgenstein's apparent rejection of some of the key propositions of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).

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Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

Banner photo at the top of this page: It varies, as the mood takes me... Sometimes it's Cloud and Palm Tree, Sydney, photo by John Tranter and a touch of Photoshop. Uh, no... it keeps changing... Oh well... whatever...